Egypt’s Forty-Eight-Hour Ultimatum

Egypt has been given forty-eight hours before the country may irrevocably change. How is it going to spend it? The timer was set at around 4 P.M. local time Monday, with an announcement from the military that it was done looking at streets filled with people. A weekend of protests has left over a dozen people dead, including at least one American student; millions of Egyptians have joined the rallies, most of them (though not all) shouting for the President, Mohamed Morsi, to leave office. He hasn’t; his party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said he won’t, because he was elected. “This is not how things are solved,” a spokesman for Morsi said, according to the Washington Post; his comments came after some protesters had set the Brotherhood’s headquarters on fire.

How things are supposed to be solved is not something General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the military commander who went on television to set the deadline, specifically said. But he did not sound like he was acting as Morsi’s protector; the forty-eight hours have been interpreted less as the time the protesters have to disperse than a deadline for the President to leave or make some accommodation—to the people of Egypt, ostensibly, but likely ultimately to the military in practice. The military and opposition deny it, but it does sound like a coup d’état with a grace period:

The armed forces repeat their call to respond to the people’s demands and gives everyone a 48-hour deadline to carry the burden of these historic circumstances that the nation is going through. It will not forgive or tolerate any shortcomings in bearing their responsibilities.

If the deadline passed, Sisi said, the military would be obliged, “out of respect for the demands of the great Egyptian people, to announce a roadmap and measures for the future.” It would do so “in collaboration with all the loyal national factions and movements, including the youth who were and remain the spark of the glorious revolution.” Several of Morsi’s cabinet members have already resigned; the Foreign Minister appears to be the latest. Military helicopters with Egyptian flags hanging from them flew low over Tahrir Square.

No party to this drama is without contradictions, often troubling ones. The protesters come armed not only with Molotov cocktails but with a petition, asking for Morsi’s resignation, that more than twenty million Egyptians have put their names to, the signatures collected by idealistic young people. (Leslie Chang has more on that.) Petitioning is a classic means seeking redress, but so are elections, and the case that voting has already proved its uselessness as an instrument of change in post-revolution Egypt is a hard one to make. Many of the protesters have serious and considered objections to the influence of Islamism on Egypt’s post-Mubarak government. But it doesn’t, for example, say much about fighting for women’s political participation when, according to many reports, sexual assault is endemic in the crowds at Tahrir Square.

(Obama, at a press conference in Tanzania on Monday, said, “Assaulting women does not qualify as peaceful protests.” He called on all sides to compromise; the day before, he had visited the tiny prison cell on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela, one of whose great accomplishments was making sure that his country’s second post-revolution election succeeded, was held for eighteen years.)

And Morsi, as an Islamist who can’t seem to manage the economy, can be hard to defend; the constitution under which Egypt is operating is messy (it doesn’t seem to have an obvious process for removing Presidents between elections, for one thing) and the Brotherhood’s protestations about true democracy may raise some doubts. Not enough has changed since the days of Mubarak, including issues of transparency and functional political institutions. Egypt might well be better off without him. But if Morsi resigns now, will petition really be seen as what did the trick rather than the military’s warning?

The question isn’t only what sort of leader Egyptians want now but whether they want voters or the military to be the ones with the “roadmap.” The military keeps talking about the will of the people, and the crowds are giving it affirmation. But was installing a military junta the reason why people danced and cried in Tahrir Square two years ago? The reply to that thought is that Morsi wasn’t exactly the ideal either. Where, though, does that leave any sort of vision of Egyptian democracy? The country now has less than forty-eight hours to figure that out, and the time is slipping away. There are some crowds in the street calling for the military to act, and others calling for the Brotherhood to stand firm. Who is shouting for democracy?

Photograph by Al-Masriya TV/AFP/Getty.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.